Stay Steady When Chaos Hits - Episode: 123
In this episode, we dive into a coaching moment with one dad who was having a hot week and falling back into an old pattern: trying to keep everyone else okay while draining himself in the process.
Highlights:
- Why chaos makes your brain shrink its focus
- The old pattern many men fall into when stress picks up
- How “I need to do more” creates depleted motivation
- Why recent wins matter when you’re in a hard week
- The difference between scattered action and steady leadership
- A simple way to widen the window and get your head back
Practical takeaways:
- When you feel scattered, pause before adding more to your plate.
- Look back at the last few weeks, months, or year and name the wins.
- Let those wins create cleaner motivation before you move into action.
This isn’t about avoiding chaos. It’s about remembering the kind of man you are while you’re in it. Listen to this episode and practice widening the window this week.
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This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Geary. This show is gonna give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community, and most importantly, your family.
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Alright, what's up, episode 123? Last week we have a group that's training to hike in Yosemite in the fall, and we had our first scrimmage hike. And our scrimmage hikes are basically just like in football, you scrimmage before the season starts. You scrimmage to get ready for the game. You get all suited up with your gear and you simulate a game, and that's what we did last week. And it's awesome to watch these guys during these bigger pushes because they started training a few months ago, and there's so much progress happening. On this one, one guy scheduled to do a 14-er out in Colorado. He lives out there, 14ers are peaks above 14,000 feet, and he did it with his mom. He had been wanting to schedule it for the last couple years, and they finally made it happen. Another guy had never hiked 12 miles before and he completed the hike. And one of these guys, I had talked to him a few days before the scrimmage, was having a tough week. We coach one-on-one together, so he showed up to this session. His dad had had a heart attack and was doing fine, but it was taking some of his time and attention. His son was graduating, so there were people coming into town and he was getting ready for that. And then just the normal week, family load was all happening. If you listen to last week's podcast, his fire was getting hot. It was moving quickly.
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And when he has this pattern, which a lot of guys do when they're feeling scattered or they're just having a week where they're extra stressed, he starts putting his energy and attention into other people, trying to make sure that everyone else is okay, everyone else is happy, enjoying themselves, not stressed. And he starts telling himself that he's got to do more. And what that does is it depletes his energy. His cup is left empty. So he's having one of those weeks, he starts telling himself that he's not doing enough, that he needs to get more done. When this happens, when we have a chaotic week, our brain shrinks its focus and it doesn't look at how much progress we've made. And I'm gonna show you what I mean with this guy because he's having a hectic week and he's not seeing the last few weeks, he's not seeing the last eight months. He came to the Grand Canyon with us back in October, and at the end of that trip, he was thriving, strong belief in himself, and he hadn't fallen from that. He just wasn't looking at that. His vision was narrowed to right now, in the moment, handling the specific problems, which isn't a bad thing. We want to be able to attack problems, but when we're scattered and we're doing it from a place of I have to do more, usually we aren't leading very well. For example, his wife was also feeling stressed about the responsibilities that had to happen that week and they weren't communicating well. And that's not how he wanted to work through all the stuff that has to happen. The stuff needs to get done to get ready for the graduation party. We need to execute the family things that are happening this week, but we don't want to do it arguing through it with our wife.
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And so in this session, we widened the window. That's what these coaching sessions are for. When he showed up, he was like, All right, we got an hour. This is what's going on for me in the moment, in this week. Let's figure out how I can handle it with some steadiness with a level head. And as I was listening to him talk through what was happening, I thought about something that he had written in the Yosemite groups chat a few weeks before. In the groups that we train for these hikes, we have a WhatsApp chat and we talk about gear, we talk about trip details, and we sometimes post prompts in there to get the group chatting a little bit. And two weeks ago, the prompt was what's one challenge that you're grateful for in each category: family, career, and fitness. And in this coaching session, all I did was go back and reread his response to that prompt. In it, he had reflected on his confidence in his career. He talked about how his family is operating well and working well together with all of life stuff. He was celebrating how he got caught up in his head over the last couple years, and he's built this practice to consistently work out and how he leaned on that practice getting to the gym to build space for himself. As I was reading this to him in the session, he kind of smiled, he kind of laughed, and I was like, What's coming up for you, man? And he said he had totally forgotten he had wrote that, and it was just two weeks ago. He had all these positive things, big wins that were happening in life. But then when shit hit the fan, the old patterns started to come back. And this is normal. When chaos comes into our life, our brain narrows our focus to in-the-moment problems and reverts to old patterns, how we've handled patterns in the past.
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It still happens to me. About a month ago, things were a little slow in the business and I was starting to worry about it. And when I start to worry, I don't focus on the tasks. I start questioning am I working on the right things? I go and I check my numbers probably like five or six times in one day that pull me away from the work that I want to be doing or I'm supposed to be prioritizing. And then I caught myself, caught myself jumping from task to task, took a breath, zoomed out, looked at the last year of business. Nothing was slow about the last year. There were a lot of wins, there's a lot of good stuff happening, and that was what I needed to do to hone back in on what I wanted to get done that day. And this is how managing our mind works, how having emotional awareness, how learning how to tend our fire works. It's like brushing your teeth. You got to be consistent with these tools. And the reason we took time in the session to look at those recent wins is because it creates a new type of motivation. It's not like he was sitting on the couch not doing anything. He was getting the things done for his dad, getting things done to get ready for graduation, still getting the kids where they needed to be, still working, but he was motivating himself from this not enoughness of needing to do more, of wanting other people to feel good. That type of motivation isn't clean motivation. I read this reflection to him, and after I asked him, what do you think about yourself when you remember that stuff? And he said, I'm consistent, I'm reliable, I've been building myself up on slow growth, and I've kind of been the rock for my family. And you can kind of feel how that type of self-talk motivates you differently. It lifts you up. It's not like there's a ton of problems happening right now. This is just life happening, and I'm the kind of guy that shows up and makes it happen. That's the type of motivation that we want to create. That is tending our fire and getting our fire to the right temperature to attack those difficult
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times. So I'm gonna walk you through it one more time. You notice that it's a crazy week, it's a busy week, and you're starting to feel scattered and you're starting to feel overwhelmed with what's going on, and you're hopping from task to task. Pause, reflect on the bigger picture. What have you done in the last couple weeks, the last couple months, the last year? Find the wins. Let those wins settle in to create better motivation, and then you start showing up for the chaos steadier with a level head, like a durable dad. The world throws a bunch of stuff at you, but you stay steady.
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Alright, that's what I got for you guys this week. I hope you have an awesome one, and I'll catch you next time.
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